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Faith dreams of apocalypse past.
The world dissolves. It reforms in murk and shadow, marked by metal clashes and guttural shouts and the sick, liquid sound of sword to flesh. Everything's muted but immediate, happening too fast. The resolution wavers, tightens and she's standing in the downpour, soaked through without feeling it, knocked aside by monstrous shapes that don't register her presence. The ground is slicked with blood and rain. She starts forward, stumbles, falls to her knees by the body. Everything hazed and sudden, for a breathless second she thinks it's Robin. She's wrong (thank God) and up close he doesn't even look like Robin, though he's familiar in a way she can't place. A voice she almost knows calls for Angel. On her feet in one motion, she turns just as the world goes white hot and blinding.
Faith stirs, reaching out and touching nothing. She's shaking as she comes awake completely, wondering when she got so used to having someone there. It was with Robin, probably, but Robin is years gone.
Buffy's at the window with her forehead pressed to the glass. It's cracked open slightly, and the wind rattles the old window panes eerily. Buffy turns, startled by Faith's movement and her eyes are dark and worried. The moonlight catches her hair and lights it silver. Half in shadow, she looks ethereal and dangerous, and Faith has to catch herself quickly.
They don't get lost in each other's beauty; it isn't their way.
Buffy's folded in on herself, tense and drawn, clenched beneath her deceptive softness. She pulls the window shut and curls up by the headboard, brushing Faith's hair from her face.
"You called out for Robin. Are you alright?"
"Peachy, B" Faith responds. Buffy's watching her through narrowed eyes, waiting. Faith finally shrugs and looks away. "It was LA."
Buffy nods, guarded and sharp. She had that dream too once, when slayers across the world dreamed the same thing too late.
Faith shivers, more from the lingering nightmare than anything, though it's chilly for an almost-summer night. Buffy's hand rests on Faith's shoulder. Her fingers, stroking absently along Faith's collarbone, are cool and she's pale in the darkness.
Faith reaches up and covers Buffy's hand with her own, squeezes her fingers, shifts over to let Buffy slide up beside her so they're pressed together, side to side.
"It's just a dream," Faith says, and it is. Slayers dream unsettled echoes and stillborn prophecies, diluted and diffused.
And Buffy nods, "I know."
Faith is closer to thirty than she is to twenty and she has yet to die young. It's terrifying. Buffy died young twice, but it didn't take. It's starting to look like they both might make it, and that was never part of the deal. Faith is dizzy from potentiality, alarmed and amazed and starting to believe.
***
"Faith. Are you okay?" Angel says later, leaning over her cautiously, the question pulled taut with the understanding that he's the only one who has ever really seen her crumble. He and Spike came all the way from LA at Buffy's insistence, and he sounds exhausted.
"Yeah. Just dreams. It was LA. It was nothing."
Angel makes a sound low in his throat, half-way between a scoff and a growl. He's tight and restrained, haunted by someone else's visions, older and more damaged than hers. He gets like that and it makes her itch, uncomfortable under the weight of his conviction that it must mean something. It doesn't mean anything. They're annoying and unsettling, the fragmented possibilities pounding at the inside of her brain, but they aren't real anymore. They're most vivid for Faith because she was at the center, the line passed through her when the new slayers were called, but she's hardly the only one who gets them.
They're the aftershocks of stifled destiny, and they're lessening with every new slayer who is called.
***
"Unforseen consequences," Giles said once in a non-explanation right after Faith and Buffy came back to London and the Watcher's Council. He watched Faith twirl the stake she'd pulled out of her belt loop. He looked ever patient and long-suffering and it pissed her off. It made her ache for Wesley, flooding her with regret and old grief.
"Oh, really?" She started, indignant, but Buffy pulled her away, down the hallway to where they stood in the doorway to watch the newest girls training.
"Would you have done it? If it had been your call?" Buffy asked. Nothing in her tone sounded hesitant, but she was rigid, braced and waiting. The current underneath said I need to know.
"It sort of was. We were all there, and I don't know what choice there was at that point."
"There's always a choice. That's not what I asked."
Buffy didn't take her eyes off the girls and Faith didn't take her eyes off Buffy's face. Nothing between them had stabilized yet. Buffy was still defensive and Faith was still mourning for Robin; the landscape was still packed and dangerous with forgotten landmines, but the tensions were easing, and Buffy didn't start at Faith's touch on her shoulder.
"I don't know," Faith said, "I guess I don't really see that it matters all that much now."
Buffy let out a breath and nodded. "Okay," she said.
"That's it? Hey, B, I'm on your side."
Buffy snapped her head around, studied Faith intently, "Yeah, I know you are." She sounded a little surprised by her own certainty. They stared at each for a moment, Faith thinking, I never thought we'd end up here either. Buffy relaxed and smiled, beckoned Faith down the hallway, "come on."
Faith walked out of the building at Buffy's side, thinking about all the ways things change.
***
Spike's staring out the window and Angel's shifting toward him, shifting away. Buffy's got her hand on Angel's arm because Spike shrugged her off and she's watching both of them warily.
"How bad is LA?" Faith asks like that's an acceptable subject change and not a phone conversation they have every other day. She has nothing to say about the reason they're here. She's not sorry that Drusilla is dead. She is sorry about Spike's silence and the harsh of set of his shoulders.
"It's quiet," Angel sinks into the chair at the other side of the table.
"Like always. It's too quiet," Spike mumbles, all defensive, sarcastic edges, "it would help to have a slayer there."
"Wolfram and Hart is my mess," Angel says, glaring.
"Fine."
"No one says you have to stay there, Spike," Angel says, and Faith catches Spike's flinch, the way he cocks his head and works his jaw like he's recovering from a blow. She feels like a voyeur and she looks away.
***
Six months after Robin died, just when Faith couldn't stand Cleveland for one more second, Buffy came for her, took her to Italy, dressed her in leather, and got her drunk beneath a strobe light.
They danced, silk-slide on leather and denim, pressed up together just like when they were sixteen and falling apart, when they were recklessly bleeding into each other. Back then it was harsh, adrenaline-laced kisses that were never mentioned, Buffy backed up against the alley wall behind the Bronze, kissing back but stilling Faith's roaming hands, holding onto her tight, but holding her away.
Now it was Faith shying away, watching herself in the dim-lit mirror of the bathroom, smearblack eyes and everything happening from a distance. Next to her, Buffy was reapplying her lipstick where it smudged pink around her mouth. She looked older than Faith remembered, and sure of herself in a way that made Faith waver, just for a second, too used to playing the foil to know what to do when she was no longer a mirror reflection, when what she had wanted so long ago was apparently (maybe) being offered.
She found Buffy later, nursing some kind of sweet rum drink and flirting with the bartender, eyes glitter gold and older than her face flicking over to Faith playfully. She ordered shots. Faith swallowed and sat down hard on the bar stool next to Buffy.
Faith eyed the bartender when he turned around, "He's cute, B. I can make myself scarce." She shot a glance back over her shoulder at her own most recent dance partner who was still hovering on the edge of the dance floor hopefully. He was gorgeous and tattooed and normally she'd have gone there already. She wasn't interested. Her heart was thundering in her throat.
Buffy turned, smiling and looking genuinely bewildered, "Why would I want you to do that?"
They left the bar together.
It was startlingly new; it was any number of a hundred drunken fucks in Faith's life. It was sex to forget; she was out of practice, but it was a rhythm she once knew like her own heartbeat. Like riding a biker and she almost smelled blood, but then she was sliding again, back into the moment and the slow deepthrustburn that made her want to crawl out of her skin. It was sex to remember, and Buffy held her there; Buffy's low gasp against her ear; Buffy's heat against her thigh.
The next morning Faith found Buffy on the balcony, staring at a cup of coffee that sat next to a paper written in Italian.
Faith hovered next to her. "Can you read that?" She asked.
"No," Buffy said, "Dawn was getting good at it before she ran off to watcher school."
"Are you going back to England?"
"I have to, don't I?"
"I'm not going back to Ohio."
"Good." There was silence for a minute and then, "Normal's never worked so well for me, you know?" Buffy started. Faith stiffened, and then they were both talking at the same time.
"B, if that's what last night was about, . . . I . . ."
"Faith, listen . . ." Buffy broke off, watching Faith across years and too much history and knowledge of each other. She lifted her head, shading her eyes with her hand. Faith squinted into the sun, the world still hang-over dizzy, surreal and shifting out from under her. Buffy, confusing and impossible, stood up, bringing them face to face and knotted a hand in Faith's hair, cupping the back of her head and kissing her purposefully, deliberately, without the fever of the night before, and something in Faith was grounded and sealed.
Buffy turned away and leaned against the railing, looking out at the street below. Faith felt closer to her than she had since the beginning, bonded by the fact that it wasn't just the two of them now, held together by others that would never know the singularity of calling, never know what it was to be so completely alone.
"Do you ever hate them?" Buffy asked only once, later. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, but she'd brought the butcher knife down too hard on the cutting board and Faith had startled, knocking her wine glass over and watching the burgundy liquid that suddenly seemed too thick spill across the white counter top. Buffy was protective of the new slayers, defensive of them; she'd be reeling from Sunnydale her entire life. For her part, Faith sometimes still thought about bombs.
The moment was suspended and too honest, all the ways they were held together by everything that made them the same laid out starkly in the light, and Faith nodded and reached out her hand.
"Yeah, B. Sometimes."
***
Faith isn't there for Angel and Buffy's fight the next night. She's in the shower. Because she got slimed by an Abrantid (Abraxis? Whatever, anyway) demon, and she smells like rotten eggs and she didn't really sleep last night, and she's not saying that's Spike and Angel's fault exactly, but they did have a fist fight in the alley, and that was distracting.
She's not really surprised when the door slams. Buffy got slimed too, and spent the whole walk home whispering under her breath in Faith's ear about the whole Wolfram-and-Hart-whoops-Spike's-alive debacle (her words, but Faith's been able to quote the rant verbatim for years, though really it's been awhile since Buffy brought it up). Buffy can be a little self-righteous even when she hasn't been hit in the face with venomous truth serum.
Abrantid demons are fucking gross and tonight sucks. That's the truth. Faith knows that's the truth because she swallowed that crap too.
Spike's sitting on the couch eyeing the door warily; he looks better than he did last night. Not great, but not like he wants to eat someone either. The look in his eyes is almost amused, if a little too hollow. "You hear the yelling then, pet?"
"You know, she's been very restrained up until this point," Faith says.
"I didn't know she was still all that pissed about it."
"Eh, sometimes. It comes up every once in awhile, and she and Angel don't really deal with things," Faith says.
"Yeah, well, there's that," Spike mutters under his breath.
"You know how they are. He went after her?"
"You know how they are."
"Still, when she gets like that it's . . . I'd probably have let her go."
"I'd probably follow her and let her pummel me," Spike says, "that happen a lot, then?"
"No, not really. Angel's special."
"Always was. You okay with that?"
"I don't know."
Spike kisses her an hour and a bottle of tequila later, kisses her more gently than she ever would have thought possible, in direct contradiction to the rough grip of his hands on her arms and the way she finds herself crushed against the wall. He tastes like lime, the bitter edge of tequila and jealousy, grief underneath, bleeding through in the desperate way that he clings to her. The slide of his tongue is hot and wet against her throat, the light graze of teeth against her pulse point throbbing through her entire body as he works his hand between them. He presses himself against her, face still buried against her shoulder, shaking, but holding human form.
That's how Angel and Buffy find them, and it's a beginning.
Faith dreams of apocalypse future.
She dreams it vivid in techni-color and washed-out in grayscale. She dreams it violent and sudden. She dreams the crawling despair as the sun burns itself out. She dreams rivers of blood or the slow fade as the world goes numb.
But she's dreaming in echoes and they're fading away.
Angel dreams of Darla in black and white.
Blood like ink in rivulets on alabaster. It's beautiful and stark and he knows it isn't fair. She was myriad things, most of them bloody and painful, but all of them vibrantly colored. It's an oversimplification when shadows that should be gray are pitch, and even the light of the moon is blinding. His hand passes through her when he reaches for her arm. She's harsh, and her eyes turn completely black when she smiles, set and colorless against the white of her skin and her hair. It stops him from seeing Connor in her. It doesn't stop him from calling her name when he wakes.
It irritates Spike, which irritates Angel. Spike will push himself up in bed, lighting a cigarette and say "It's Darla. It's Connor," like that explains why Angel can't ever sleep for more than three hours at a time. Chaos is not a revelation for Spike; it's all he's ever known.
Spike tries to listen. He doesn't try hard, but he tries. It's just that remembering isn't the same as being haunted.
***
"I was there," Buffy says, and he feels the warm pressure of her hand on his forearm, "I'm sorry we didn't reach you in time." She's talking about Drusilla and Inverness. She's lying. "She was crazy, Angel, but she was smart. She was smart, and Rona couldn't . . . ." She trails off, starts in again, softer, "it happened so fast. I didn't realize how bad it was until it was done."
She's talking to him, but looking at Spike out of the corner of her eye, nervously. Spike still isn't looking at them, and his silence makes Angel uneasy, throws him off-balance. He sighs.
"I'm not," he says, "it's for the best, Buffy, really." He's lying too, about the first part, even if the second part's true.
"How long can you stay?" Buffy asks, and there's something held back, something she isn't saying. He just hears "stay." Except for one night in Sunnydale at one particular end of the world, she's been asking him that since she was sixteen. He's never been able to explain to her why he can't.
He's never been able to truly make her understand that he will always come back. He can't live saturated with her, in the light of her world, but he can't live without it either; he thinks he'll probably circle her forever.
Angel is used to circles.
"However long his great broodiness thinks LA can spare us." Spike's the one who answers, and the statement is almost a question, designed to bait him, but there's no real venom there. Angel grits his teeth and tries not to snap again, at the sentiment or at the shuttered grief in Spike's voice. He wants to reach for him, and he wants to turn away. He's not sure Spike would let him anyway, not about this. He can almost feel Drusilla, the sharp scratch of her nails down his arm (down his back), her laughter in his head. He's been hearing ghosts since LA went under, and the knowledge that she's gone makes her into one clearly, pulls everything she is to the surface. It makes her explicitly impossible and unquestionably lost. It's for the best and it makes everything in him ache.
***
Angel takes Buffy to dinner when he's in London. It's rare and it's make-believe. They can pretend to be normal now that they've both abandoned it. He has no illusions that she won't do what she has to. She has no doubts of his capacity for sacrifice. They've long ago left behind the idea of romantic need. It's liberating and it's tragic. The facade of it is almost painful and she's still the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
"How's Connor?" she always asks and he hears awareness of Darla's echo in every word. She will never have children and he wonders if she ever wanted to. She smiles warmly, and a curtain falls behind her eyes. She's harder than she used to be, reconciled to this by too many last stands. He understands her better than he ever has and wishes he understood her less. He knows regret, but hers rip her apart because her darkness rips her apart, not because she secretly craves it. Angel can't have the same kind of regret without feeling, just on the edges in the traitorous depths, that he isn't quite sorry enough.
He watches her with Faith, watches Spike watch them and it's nothing like before, but there are moments. There are moments when Spike defers too easily, when Buffy's smile is too sharp, when Faith's dreams give her riddles and her eyes turn dark and strange. He can spiral back a hundred years in an instant, and his whole life is heavy with memory and time.
When Faith is restless she strips her clothes off and sits at the window chain smoking naked. He found her that way once, when she and Buffy showed up at the Hyperion, just after LA. His own wounds were fresh and bleeding and she was still dreaming about Sunnydale every night. Her eyes were deep and shadowed, turbulent; she smelled starkly of blood and arousal. Faith always bruises easily, but she heals just as quickly, and every battle leaves gray stains on her skin that fade by the next day. Faith hunts alone sometimes, when her walls are thin and her emotions are close to the surface, but Angel recognizes that hunger, the part of her that likes to bleed.
She has never been a seer and he did not make her what she is. "You saved me," she's said to him so many times, in so many ways, and he wants to deny even that responsibility turned inside out.
"Are you alright?" He asked.
"Sure. Just blowing off steam. Couldn't sleep."
"Do those hurt?" He touched the dark spot on her arm. The bruises, not the dreams. He thought he meant the bruises.
"Not really."
"Did you see anything?" He didn't know what he meant.
"The dreams you mean?" She laughed, took a drag on the cigarette, "Just Sunnydale. Again. Aren't you the one with some mystical connection to the powers that be?"
"I don't think it's going to work like that again."
She stubbed out her cigarette on the ledge and leaned out the window, looking at the rubble below. "Angel, it doesn't look like it worked all that well the first time."
***
It's strange being out of LA. He leaves sometimes, whenever Buffy and Faith get too worried or Connor calls or Spike stumbles in drunk and threatens to stake himself if he doesn't get out of the smog. Angel points out that smog shouldn't bother anyone who doesn't breathe, and Spike says that's not the point, and it isn't. LA looks normal, brash and hot, false in the sun and too real in the shadows, but it's buzzing underneath, almost audible, just out of reach. It's buzzing in his skin and in his head, the certainty that Wolfram and Hart aren't done there yet, present and dark, like the brand they burned into his skin. Spike can feel it too. He's better at ignoring it, but when it gets through he goes stir crazy. He gets in fights he can barely win and he comes back bloody with his inner monologue externalized, murmuring questions and demands against Angel's skin, always too hot here and what now and fuck me and let's go, Angel, let's go. He's all edges and old violence, insisting everything is different now and bleeding distorted memory from every pore. It's familiar in so many ways, to the taste and the touch. It's different, too gentle, peeled back and real, in ways that leave Angel grateful and unsteady, holding on and pushing away.
He could script their conversations; they've known each other so long.
"Why are you still here?" Angel asks, "no one said you had to stay," and he means it, means I don't understand why you're still here. He doesn't mean I want you to go.
"Somebody has to make sure you don't guilt yourself back into eating rats," Spike says, and he usually passes out at that point and then he stays until they both leave, for awhile.
Tonight Angel lashes out, angry and tense, skin too tight to hold the memories. Nobody says you have to stay there, and Spike flinches and looks away.
***
Spike and Angel sat on Angel's desk at Wolfram and Hart. Fred was gone and they hadn't seen Buffy in Italy and everything was fading.
"Are you moving on?" Spike asked.
"Oh, yeah."
"No, you're not."
"You're one to talk."
"Better at it than you are."
"In what way?"
"In the way of not sitting around bitching and moaning for a hundred years?"
"I thought we were talking about Buffy."
"Now we're talking about all the rest of your whining."
"Could we not?"
Spike was quiet for a minute, and Angel never knew what to do with that. The tension in the room shifted, suddenly saturated and deep. Angel wanted to move away from Spike, but found himself almost involuntarily edging closer. Spike sighed.
"I would've died a pathetic excuse for a poet in the nineteenth century. I'd've missed rock music and fried onion blossoms and motorcycles."
"Video games."
"Woodstock."
"Barry Manilow."
"Speak for yourself."
There was a long silence, and Angel didn't look at Spike, sure he couldn't see him clearly through whatever the new-old thing was that was condensing between them.
"Buffy," he finally said.
"Drusilla," Spike didn't say, "even you," but he didn't have to. His voice was low and insistent, his hand suddenly on Angel's arm, hot and charged, burning with the demand he really shouldn't have voiced but did anyway. "I want you to tell me you'd take it all back."
Angel wanted to and couldn't, so he pushed Spike up against the necro-tempered glass and Spike shuddered, surprised but not at the suddenness as the heat flared with the increased contact, pulsing with the throb of the old memories and the sharp and raw emotional edge of the new. They fucked for the first time since Spike had gotten his soul, and it wasn't any kind of an answer. It was the only one Angel had.
***
Buffy's standing in the middle of her living room dripping demon goo. She's flushed and she's angry, but the anger is heated and her eyes haven't gone cold. They've had worse fights, but he isn't sure what this one is about. He'd said no, we don't need a slayer in LA, not knowing what we know. No, you and Faith shouldn't come. He'd said my fight and she'd stopped still in the doorway, turning to face him.
"You can't save me, you know," she says, voice too quiet.
"Buffy, that's not . . ."
"Not what? Not exactly what this is about? What it's always about?"
"That's not fair."
"Yes, it is! I'm not sixteen Angel, and it has been a long, long time since you have needed to protect me."
She's not really looking at him; she's looking at the wall somewhere over his shoulder. He says, "Buffy, it's not about you." She turns away, turns back toward him. He's dizzy suddenly; he hears his own echo. What I do here, and you're not part of it. He was defending Faith then, all those years ago, when she was the one who still needed it. He was defending himself.
"You didn't even tell me," Buffy's voice cracks, "I had to dream it. I had to hear it from Willow and the coven. I had to search LA; I was sure you were dead. You tell me that's fair, Angel."
"Buffy, we've talked about this."
"Yeah, we always talk about it. We talk about how you punish yourself by refusing to ask for help. We talk about how you and Spike still haven't caught up with Wolfram and Hart even three years later."
"Buffy, it's . . ."
"It's what? Your fight? 'Cause yeah. We've talked about that too. Oh! Or it's Spike's fight what about that?"
"That's different and you know it," he bites out, wondering where Spike is. He disappeared when Angel and Buffy started in, probably skulking around in the back alley with a cigarette again. Maybe with Faith. Angel's hit with vertigo and familiarity (Darla, too coldly demanding to know what was so fascinating about Drusilla's "idiot toy." With Darla he'd be bleeding by now). Buffy softens a bit, her fists unclench at least, and she leans back against the wall, rubs one hand over her face.
"I know it, Angel, I do, but . . . it's just . . ." she breaks off, shakes her head and smiles a little tensely as she brushes past him, "look, I just need some air, okay?"
He gives her five minutes before he follows her out.
***
The whole world feels weighted and cumulative, spun out of control in that inevitable spiraled rush. Darla's specter ironically calls it the whirlwind, and sometimes he can hear her so clearly he's amazed he's the only one who can. She understood meaning at the end, but she never believed in destiny anyway.
On the edge of consciousness he can still hear a whispered voice say, "Close your eyes." He doesn't know whose it is.
Buffy dreams of The First.
Dark, cavernous spaces aren't protection. There's nowhere to hide; she knows that instinctively. She can't reach the walls, can't even see them, and the blackness seethes around her. The First lurks in the shadows, and that's all she knows. First Evil. First Slayer. There's something wrong, at the gut level, with conflating the two, but they hover around her, pulling at her, and she follows them down. Further in and all she can hear is that they both speak with Kendra's voice.
"You think you know, who you are, what's to come. You haven't even begun."
It's the only recurring dream she gets. Faith and the first of the other slayers called, they all dream in consequences, but Buffy rarely does. She feels like those dreams should be hers. It was her decision after all, to do what they did, for all that the others like to claim equal responsibility. It was her idea to face the unforeseen consequences of nightmares and guilt and children who can be slayers whether or not they should be. She'd still have done it if she'd known; she wouldn't take it back. She lives with that and with the First Slayer's voice in her dreams. She keeps a list of the dead, but she lives.
***
Drusilla died in Inverness. It may or may not have been her plan, but there was definitely an army of baby vampires running around and they were definitely raising something nasty. Still, she'd told Rona to wait, to let her try to contact Angel and Spike, but they'd started abducting children for the ritual and Rona really hadn't had a choice. It was already almost over by the time Buffy arrived.
"Spike," Buffy says, getting up from the table and walking over to him, "Are you -"
"Don't worry about it Slayer," he says, and he's gentle to her despite the cut of the old nickname, looking at her like he always does, with so much intensity that it makes her blood heat up and rush, "I almost did it once myself." She remembers that, remembers being bored and tired and angry. She remembers his eyes when he said the face of my salvation, but that was years and a soul ago and they've all died since then. She lays her hand on his arm, and this time he lets her. She thinks we are the ones who come back. She and Spike will never stop navigating all their old pain.
***
It was Faith who found her the night after Sunnydale, sitting outside by the bus. Dawn was asleep, and Buffy suspected that the others were too shell shocked to be looking.
"How you holdin' up, B?" Faith asked.
"We did it."
"Again. Spike, he was something else."
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Come on, B! We just told destiny to go fuck itself. All of those girls in there - slayers. It worked. Did you really think it was going to work?"
"You didn't?" Buffy asked.
"Not really, no," Faith paused, following Buffy's gaze out into the night, "You're no longer the only savior of the world Buffy Summers. What are you gonna do now?"
Buffy sat back, stunned and reeling, laughing a little in shock and disbelief, "I really didn't get that far."
They watched the sunrise that day, weary and in tune with each other in a way that Buffy remembered from right after they met, before betrayal and blood.
That was maybe when they started, though Buffy still wouldn't have believed it then.
***
A year later Buffy sat curled up on the couch watching the news of the massive earthquake in LA and replaying Willow's words about "magical upheaval" in her mind. Faith's voice, tinny through the phone line, was heavy with sleep and edged with panic. "God, B, I'm glad you called. Tell me everything's alright and that I'm just crazy, because that one felt real."
"Turn on your TV."
"Oh God."
"It's LA, Faith."
There was a long pause, and then, "I know. I saw."
"Meet me there?"
"As soon as I can."
***
A year after that Buffy woke up to Faith's phone call.
"Buffy?" Faith sounded too quiet, and her voice was shaking. She didn't speak after that for a couple of minutes. Buffy stared out the window into Rome's early morning and listened to Faith breathe deeply, holding on tight to control she was clearly losing. Buffy realized she was trembling herself.
"Faith? What is it? What's wrong?"
"Just, It's Robin, B. I need . . . can you come?" Faith was crying then, softly, barely audible through the phone. It was foreign to Buffy. She wouldn't have thought it, couldn't have pictured it, and it twisted something up inside her, deep where she'd always had sympathy pains, in that place that had always said sister, in that place that wanted more.
"Faith. Yes, of course."
***
There's new tension in the air. Angel and Spike are on edge, touching and then jerking apart. Faith is tense and nervous, wary. The wind is shifting. Something, somewhere, is going to crack. Drusilla is dead, and Buffy won't apologize for that, though the look in Spike's eyes makes her feel like she should. She's not sure Angel would forgive her if she did.
Later, Faith will blame the truth serum demon goo for the fight. Buffy attributes it to everything that's happened for years; it's no different than so many previous arguments except in its outcome. It changes everything and nothing; it alters their dynamic and confirms the inevitable. What happens between them started years before, with Andrew's nervous tick and averted eyes, groaning out in one breath that Spike was alive. Alive. With Buffy's guilt over not going to LA to see for herself as soon as Andrew said it, with Spike's bravado and Angel's never ending self flagellation.
With her own.
***
God, she hates feeling helpless, and Angel says the worst possible thing, which is We have to do this alone, Buffy.
"You. Can't. Save. Me." She tastes her words, coppery on the back of her tongue, and when she walks out she pretends that she doesn't hear Angel's footsteps in the street behind her for blocks.
She finally lets him catch her by the water. She leans against a lamp post and waits. She can hear his approach from the shadows; she feels the phantom knowledge of his presence under her skin like nothing has changed since she was stupid and sixteen. He doesn't talk when he reaches her, just sweeps her up against him and kisses her until her heart is thudding in her chest and she's clinging to him, sure her legs won't hold her. He's clinging to her, one arm tight against her back, nearly lifting her, the other tangled in her hair. They stand wrapped in each other in the circle of light. The night is warm, the moon is huge and the whole thing is sweetly, stupidly, romantically cliche. She laughs into his kiss, in confusion and relief.
She's apprehensive about what Spike will say, but it turns out not to matter, because while they were gone Spike and Faith got jealous and riotously drunk and then fucked in the hallway outside the bedroom. Angel and Buffy walk in to find an empty bottle of tequila and Faith passed out wearing only the blanket Spike threw over her. Spike's leaning back against the couch, nursing both his head and his tongue, which he apparently singed while licking salt off the tiny cross tattoo on the inside of Faith's thigh.
Buffy stops short in the doorway, measuring the scene in front of her; Angel stops behind her with one hand on her shoulder and snorts a laugh, "Spike. Seriously?"
Spike, slumped against the couch, holds up one hand and gestures at them accusingly, mumbling something that sounds vaguely like "I knew it." Buffy, tired to the point of hysteria, starts laughing. She drops her head in her hands and sinks down on the couch and when she finally manages to look up, the twin horrified and bemused expressions on Spike's and Angel's faces set her off again.
Next to her, Faith starts to stir and pushes herself up, leaning against the arm of the couch.
"B, I don't know what . . . I'm sorry," she starts, but Buffy waves her into silence.
"No, Faith, it's . . . I don't know. It's fine." She's laughing again, but then Faith's hands are on her, lightly rubbing at the back of her neck and Buffy shudders and stills.
"You've been doing what I think you've been doing, haven't you B?" Faith's voice is low and husky and her breath is tequila wet against Buffy's skin, sending a low shiver up her spine.
"What about you?" She breathes in response, her voice unsteady, unfocused. Faith's only answer is to lean in and lick a stripe across Buffy's throat, sliding her hand over Buffy's thigh. Buffy gasps and the couch dips on her other side as another hand cups the back of her head. Then Spike is kissing her like he used to kiss her, like he could see her like she couldn't even see herself and Faith is still licking at her, the swipe of her tongue pinging sensation through Buffy's entire body. There's nothing sweetly romantic about it.
Buffy can feel Angel's eyes, and she pulls away from Spike to look up. Angel's leaning against the wall on the other side of the room, eyes on them, dark with heat, but the rest of his face unreadable. She holds his gaze and lets the need of it rush through as she reaches out her hand.
"Well?" Spike asks, looking at Angel, and something loaded passes between them, some question she can't read is asked and answered.
Angel crosses the room in one motion. He takes her hand, but kisses Spike first, rough and hot, leaning over him on the couch. Angel's holding onto her tight and Faith is curled against her, sliding one leg over her, one hand in Buffy's hair, the other trailing down Angel's back. She closes her eyes and kisses Faith, letting everything shift and fall into place.
Buffy dreams of loneliness, of emptiness and nightscapes, of deserts and oceans, of places where she can see forever and is doomed to be alone.
But she's one of many in so many ways, and they're only dreams after all.
Spike dreams of coming apart, of falling and bleeding and burning through.
The dreams don't wake him, and when he finally does wake, he only remembers sensation. Faint and too familiar, it's a constant presence that doesn't fade as nightmares should: the lick of flames and the pound of rain, the sharp, immediate sting of swords and daggers and the slow growing burn of being ignited from the inside out.
Spike has a list of all the ways Buffy has saved him, a list of four hundred and ten ways Angel is a magnificent ponce and a list of fifty ways Faith is more fun that anyone else he knows. Number thirty-two is that she likes bar fights. A lot. And she's been kicked out of more bars in London than he has (though it isn't a contest, and really, she lives here so it's hardly fair anyway). Angel only has bar fights under duress, and Buffy apparently only has them when she's working or self-loathing. Spike likes people who have bar fights for fun.
When he's in London and bored, or when Buffy and Angel are off torturing themselves with what they can never have again, he lets Faith drag him through the city. It's strange that she knows it better than he does. He once knew it completely, just after he was turned, and he's known it so many times over since then. Faith knows where to go now when she's looking for trouble, knows the demon bars where they fear her and where William the Bloody might still get a second look.
The first time she took him out with the express purpose of a bar fight, it was the first time he'd been out of LA since the thing with the Black Thorne. Spike and Faith were in a fairly respectable human bar and Spike was staring into his beer - Guinness, which is dark and slides down heavy. As liquids should.
Faith was drumming her fingers on the counter top, tapping out an uneven rhythm, staccato and impatient. "Don't tell me you're brooding," she said, "because we get enough of that from Angel and I don't think I can take it from both of you."
"Do you ever feel completely irrelevant?" He asked. Faith barked a laugh, more in shock than anything.
"What's this about? You mean, you and me? 'Cause we're like, not the originals? I used to. I really did," she was serious for a moment, searching him, but then she shrugged and slammed back another shot and the moment passed, "Oh, but I think we've proven we aren't irrelevant, at least. Didn't you save the world or something once? I can never remember; it's not like we talk about it much." She rolled her eyes.
"Right, well there was that then."
"And I get to be whacked with the unforeseen consequences of mucking with the slayer line."
"Makes you feel special, does it pet?"
"Eh. Special, homicidal, whatever." She grinned wickedly, handing him a new shot and holding up her own for a toast. "Here's to unforeseen consequences. We're the wild cards, Spike." She tossed her hair out of her face as she downed the shot in one easy motion
"To unforeseen consequences," he echoed her words and her movement, watching the line of her throat as she swallowed.
"Come on," she said, motioning toward the door, "I know a place that's a lot more fun than this."
***
Spike hasn't seen Dru since Sunnydale. He'll never see her again. There are too many conflicting memories crawling under his skin and he somewhat irrationally wants to set Angel, or maybe himself, on fire. He should have known the second he lost her for good. There was a part of him that assumed he'd feel her pull forever.
The room is too small and the others are too cautious. It makes him feel like something is going to explode. Buffy's too gentle and Angel keeps shooting him looks that fall somewhere between worried and annoyed. Spike wants to punch him in the face, but instead he leaves the room. The kitchen door opens onto a dark and dirty alley, but that's okay. Spike has a certain fondness for dark and dirty London alleys. He paces, shakily inhaling cigarette smoke and trying not to think. He's a lot irritated and not very surprised when Angel follows him out.
"Hey," Angel says and Spike really wants to hit him.
"What?"
"Spike."
"Don't."
"I'm trying to talk here, do you always have to be so difficult?"
"No one said you had to follow me, Angel." Spike rolls his eyes, but doesn't move, just leans back against the wall. Angel shifts uncomfortably.
"Listen. What I said earlier, I didn't mean that I want you to go. I just . . ."
"God, you're such a wanker. Sometimes things are not about you."
"I know what this is about." Angel's quiet and contained, and oh, that is not helping.
"Do you then? Da?" Memory thrown in Angel's face and Angel flinches just like he's supposed to.
"Maybe it's for the best, Spike."
"You keep saying that. Are you listening to yourself?"
"Oh, and what would you have done if you'd seen her again? Do you really think you could let her go?"
"You always did. You let both of us go. No matter what, and I remember some particularly fun adventures with holy water and hot pokers."
"We never really talked about that."
"Oh, go on. Try." Spike's growling, low, almost under his breath, tensing and not even trying for restraint and then he's moving forward before he's even formulated the thought. His fist connects solidly and Angel stumbles back against the wall. Spike takes advantage of Angel's momentary surprise to get a few good blows in, but Spike's fighting blindly, out of control. When Angel tackles him he lands hard with Angel's weight on top of him, and there's an uncomfortable pressure in his chest where the air would have been knocked out of a human. He lies there staring up at the sky between the buildings over Angel's shoulder. Angel smells like family and Spike's really too tired for the fight, but that makes him want to start it all over again.
"I tried once, you know."
"Tried?" Angel asks, pushing himself up to a sitting position, looking down at Spike, who hasn't moved. The alley smells like something rotting. It's a metaphor. Spike's just not sure for what.
"Dru. Tied her up. Threatened to stake her for Buffy."
"I set her on fire once. And Darla."
"Yeah, I know," Spike says, and Angel looks at him strangely. "She told me. Before I tried to stake her."
Angel sighs and offers his hand to Spike who hesitates before taking it and letting himself be pulled to his feet. Angel just keeps pulling, though, pulling Spike against him, cupping the back of Spike's neck in one hand, gentle pressure at the base of Spike's skull. Spike reaches up one hand to grip Angel's arm and Angel tips his head until their foreheads are pressed together, and they're just standing there, still, not speaking. Tension slides down Spike's spine and Angel's hand tightens. There's too much revealed in that movement; there's so much violence between them in part because it makes it easier to avoid this.
"Spike," Angel says quietly and with too much conviction, in the same tone of voice that he usually says idiot, "don't you get it? Now we'll never have to do it. It'll never fall to us."
***
Spike can't always be entirely sure why he's still here. He used to think it made him special; he's pretty sure now that it just makes him stubborn. Angel can have destiny; Spike chose this on his own, after all.
Angel asked him to stay. It's not completely true, for all that it's a real reason. They crawled into the Hyperion when they somehow found themselves alive and alone at dawn. Spike took a stake through the abdomen from some ugly, hairy demon with bad aim. Even so, Angel was worse off. His left arm was scorched from the dragon fire and a cut on his head was deep and oozing blood. He could barely walk from the gash in his side. Hunched over and nursing his wound, Spike had headed down to the sewers to find a path to somewhere to call for help. It was time for Buffy and slayers. It was time for the cavalry, and if Angel didn't like that he could bloody well take a stroll in the sunlight.
"Spike, wait."
Spike turned as fast as the pain would allow, ready for the fight, but Angel shook his head, cautiously getting to his feet. "No, Spike. We stay together." Spike nodded. One hand held tight to his chest to stop the blood flow, he slid the other arm around Angel's back to support him.
***
Maybe the real choice came then, or maybe it came later, afterward, sitting with Buffy outside what was left of the Hyperion. She was clinging onto his arm, but she wasn't crying anymore.
"Spike. God. Why didn't you tell me."
"I didn't know how."
"Didn't know how? Phones can call Italy, you know."
"Not now, Buffy, okay?" She quieted, looked up to study the sky. It was smoggy and purple and they couldn't see the stars, but it was no different than any other night in LA. There was still rubble, but the city was resilient, the way people are. It was amazing.
"Yeah. Okay."
"Did you ask Angel about it?"
"Yeah."
"What did he say."
"Nothing. He's not exactly forthcoming."
"He's staying here."
Buffy sighed, still not looking at him, "Yeah. He did say that."
"Oh, come on. You're surprised? What answer did you think you'd get?"
"That one. It's not that, Spike. It's just, I get tired of the same things over and over with him. It plays out the same way, and nothing changes between us."
"And you think things change between you and me?"
She looked at him then, incredulously. "Yeah. Constantly. Spike, I . . ."
"Buffy, don't," he closed his eyes. His body still ached. The stake wound was taking forever to heal on animal blood. He felt empty and exhausted. He wasn't even sure he was relieved to be alive, and Angel had a burnt-out look in his eyes that it scared Spike to see. Buffy was looking at him openly, and he was half in love with her, and half confused and it was all too much.
"What?"
"Listen Buffy, I'm staying here too, so just don't ask. I'm not sure what I would do if you asked."
She sighed, "I figured. I wasn't going to . . . It's not that. It's . . . Spike, did you really not believe me? Under the school?"
"Does that matter now?"
"Yeah. It kinda does."
He turned toward her, and she looked sincere and vulnerable, but was searching his eyes without flinching. He reached out and pulled her against him.
"Yeah, Buffy, I love you, too."
She whispered from where her face was pressed against his neck, "Spike?"
"Yeah?"
"Take care of each other, will you?"
They were already doing that. It's what they do, in their way.
The real choice didn't happen only once. It's one he keeps making.
***
Dru's death hollows out pieces of his memory, leaves Angel as his only constant, the only one who knows the history and can remember what he's always been. They will hate and love and fight and fuck. He'll never leave and Angel will never ask him too, and they'll never talk about it. You get by on your own when there's no other choice, but memory isn't the same when you're the only one who has it.
***
Faith wakes suddenly, with a gasp. She's got one hand on Spike's arm, her nails digging crescents into his skin. He turns toward her and pushes himself up until he's leaning over her on one elbow. He runs his fingers through her hair where it's fanned out, dark against the pillow, and she stares past him for a moment, unseeing, before she blinks and her grip loosens.
"You okay, pet?"
"Fine. I'm fine," she lets out a shaky breath and lets go of his arm. "Hey, it's not a big deal." She relaxes and closes her eyes, turning her head toward Buffy who is curled up on Faith's other side, asleep.
Spike strokes Faith's hair lightly until her breathing evens out, then looks up and realizes Angel is watching them, his eyes shadowed, the expression on his face rattled and unnerved. He meets Spike's eyes over Buffy and Faith who are tangled together on the bed between them, and the moment freezes and locks. Spike swallows back memory and looks at Angel, back lit by moonlight, for one beat, two, and everything's still and unsettled for a moment, but then he's counting by the heartbeats he can hear in the darkness and the world tilts back into motion. He could look away, but he doesn't, and Angel is still watching him so Spike reaches out his hand and grips Angel's wrist.
"Hey, everything okay there?" He's thinking soul-wise, and he knows it is, but he wants Angel to say it, knows this is important, because where Angel's thinking pattern, Spike is thinking new. Angel looks away, but turns his hand so he and Spike are palm to palm, fingers twined together in a rare and quiet intimacy.
Angel nods and squeezes Spike's hand, "yeah." Spike's still watching Angel, who's looking down at Buffy and Faith, who for once look as young as they are. He's back lit by history, but things are more different than they are the same, and it's easy, for a moment, to exist in the present tense.
Spike dreams in memories and borrowed time, his life spread before him in emotions and tactile sensations, stinging and discordant, but fleeting. He dreams death on all sides, mourning loss and thrilling pleasure and the fading pain at the loss of consciousness and self. He dreams of all the endings that could have been, and didn't come to be.